china

Medical cosmetic tourism in Taiwan lures high-end mainland Chinese travelers

Winnie checked into a cosy Taipei clinic one recent afternoon for a full facial rejuvenation – a few Botox injections to tackle wrinkles and then filler gels to plump up folds and lips.

It took the 39-year-old business woman, just arrived that morning from Shanghai, slightly more than three hours to complete the treatment before she headed back to a five-star hotel, feeling radiant.

Winnie, who declined to give her full name during a telephone interview with the South China Morning Post, is typical of the mid- and-high-end mainland tourists that Taiwanese tour providers are targeting to cushion the drastic impact that a new travel law implemented on the mainland has had on their business.

The law, the first introduced by the mainland to address such issues as tourist safety, unfair competition and “forced shopping”, has certainly taken a rapid and heavy toll on Taiwan’s tourism industry – the number of mainland group visitors has slumped since the regulation came into force on October 1.

Soon after Taiwan began to allow mainland tourists to visit the island in groups in 2008, cut-throat competition broke out among local travel agencies to lure their business, mainly by offering dirt-cheap tours and then recouping the costs through commissions paid by partner shops to which the tour groups were shepherded.

Since 2008, more than 6.2 million mainland tourists have visited Taiwan, a huge new revenue source worth US$15.68 billion for the island, according to the Beijing-based Association for Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Strait.

But along with the new influx has come a wave of complaints from the tourists. Their grumbles include being forced to get up before dawn, eat food that even farm animals would refuse, and sleep in accommodation not fit for pigs.

They also lash out at the number of forced shopping tours, which cut into sightseeing.

Now, with the introduction of the travel law, group tour prices have increased by 20 to 50 per cent – and the number of mainland group visitors has dropped, totaling just 54,705 in the first 20 days of October, a drop of 35.7 per cent compared with the same period last year, Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau said.

“To cope with the new situation, local operators are encouraged to find new revenue sources, and medical cosmetic tourism is seen as one of the sources with a promising outlook,” said Lai Cheng-yi, head of the Tourism and Hotel Business Association based in Taipei.

Walter Yeh, executive vice president of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council  , said that in addition to allowing mainland visitors to travel here in groups as well as individually, the island also eased regulations in January last year to permit them to visit Taiwan for medical treatment, including for cosmetic procedures.

“This is a good time for local operators to develop this field of tourism,” he said, adding that Taiwan’s medical care is noted for its good quality and relative cheapness.

Some 100,000 medical tourists visited the island last year, up 156 per cent from 39,000 in 2011, generating revenue of around NT$70 billion (HK$18.4 billion), of which at least 40 per cent came from mainland tourists, Yeh said.

The profitable business has prompted hospitals and medical cosmetic clinics to work with Taiwanese travel agencies to organize cosmetic tours.

Compared with South Korea, whose cosmetic surgery is rated among the best in the world, such procedures in Taiwan mainly involve gel injections and very limited invasive surgery, medical cosmetic operators said.

“But with mainland standards at least five years behind Taiwan, many mainland tourists are eager to have facial rejuvenation and skin tightening treatment here,” said Dr Chu Chih-kai, head of Taipei-based Beauty Plus, one of the island’s leading medical cosmetic clinics.

Dr Chu said Taiwan’s high efficiency, convenience, its adherence to international standards as well as transparency and safety were major reasons why mainlanders were keen to take advantage of the services available in Taiwan.

“Ten per cent of our clients come from the mainland,” Dr Chu said, adding they include men as well as women.

Several big travel agencies in Taiwan have worked with major hospitals and clinics to offer medical cosmetic services to mainlanders. Some agencies have offered packages ranging from NT$45,000 to NT$180,000 for trips that include stays at five-star hotels and sightseeing tours.

As part of marketing strategies to attract more mainlanders to take medical cosmetic tours, Kuan Chou Travel Service will hold a three-day seminar from December 8 in the southern city of Kaohsiung to discuss medical cosmetics and its trends on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

“Participants will include physicians, treatment operators and tour providers from Taiwan, the mainland, Hong Kong and Macau,” Silvia Hu, marketing and PR manager of Kuan Chou Travel Service.

To ensure quality and good service, the Health Ministry has approved 38 hospitals and clinics to treat mainland tourists, while the Taiwan Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation, a non-profit hospital accreditation agency, has certified 19 medical cosmetic clinics for their quality of treatment.

Winnie, who came on a five-day tour, certainly has no complaints about the quality of service. On the contrary, she declared herself “highly satisfied” with what she described as an “afternoon tea” treatment. It made her look great.

Source: South China Morning post

 

‘Dead’ baby wakes at China funeral parlour before cremation

dead baby

A Chinese baby boy who had been declared dead was saved from being cremated alive when he started crying at a funeral parlour, media reported Thursday.

The parents of the critically-ill boy, who was less than one month old, had agreed to end his medical treatment at Anhui Provincial Children’s Hospital in eastern China, hospital sources told Xinhua state news agency.

A death certificate was issued before the baby was sent to a funeral parlour in Hefei, the provincial capital — only for staff there to be alerted by crying on Wednesday.
It was unclear how long he had been at the funeral parlour, or when his cremation had been due.

The baby was immediately sent back to the hospital, several news outlets including the Beijing News reported on Thursday.

“Because the baby still had life signs, we continued to give him transfusion to maintain his life for humanitarian reasons,” a hospital staff member told Xinhua.

The baby was born with a “congenital respiratory system malformation”, the report added.
The baby was receiving treatment at the hospital late Wednesday, reports said.

A doctor was suspended, a nursing worker laid off and an investigation launched into the incident, the hospital said, according to Xinhua.

Source: Times of India

 

Bird flu strain infects human for 1st time

A strain of bird flu that scientists thought could not infect people has shown up in a Taiwanese woman, a nasty surprise that shows scientists must do more to spot worrisome flu strains before they ignite a global outbreak, doctors say.

On a more hopeful front, two pharmaceuticals separately reported encouraging results from human tests of a possible vaccine against a different type of bird flu that has been spreading in China since first being identified last spring, which is feared to have pandemic potential.

The woman, 20, was hospitalized in May with a lung infection. After being treated with Tamiflu and antibiotics, she was released. One of her throat swabs was sent to the Taiwan Centres for Disease Control. Experts there identified it as the H6N1 bird flu, widely circulating in chickens on the island.

The patient, who was not identified, worked in a deli and had no known connection to live birds. Investigators couldn’t figure out how she was infected. But they noted several of her close family and friends also developed flu-like symptoms after spending time with her, though none tested positive for H6N1. The research was published online Thursday in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

Since the H5N1 bird flu strain first broke out in southern China in 1996, public health officials have been nervously monitoring its progress — it has so far killed more than 600 people, mostly in Asia. Several other bird flu strains, including H7N9, which was first identified in China in April, have also caused concern but none has so far mutated into a form able to spread easily among people.

“The question again is what would it take for these viruses to evolve into a pandemic strain?” wrote Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, in a commentary accompanying the new report.

She said it was worrying that scientists had no early warning signals that such new bird flus could be a problem until humans fell ill. Scientists often monitor birds to see which viruses are killing them, in an attempt to guess which flu strains might be troublesome for humans — but neither H6N1 nor H7N9 make birds very sick.

Koopmans called for increased surveillance of animal flu viruses and more research into predicting which viruses might cause a global crisis.

“We can surely do better than to have human beings as sentinels,” she wrote.

The vaccine news is on the H7N9 bird flu that has infected at least 137 people and killed at least 45 since last spring. Scientists from Novavax Inc., a Gaithersburg, Maryland, company, say tests on 284 people suggest that after two shots of the vaccine, most made antibodies at a level that usually confers protection.

“They gave a third of the usual dose and yet had antibodies in over 80 percent,” said an expert not connected with the work, Dr. Greg Poland of the Mayo Clinic. “This is encouraging news. We’ve struggled to make vaccines quickly enough against novel viruses,” he said.

Results were published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a separate announcement on Thursday, Switzerland-based Novartis announced early tests on its H7N9 vaccine in 400 people showed 85 percent of them got a protective immune response after two doses. The data has not yet been published

Source: Yahoo news

Chinese boy whose eyes were gouged out is getting implants

A 6-year-old Chinese boy whose eyes were gouged out by an attacker is receiving implants at a hospital in southern China after a Hong Kong eye doctor volunteered his service.

The implants are a precursor to fitting Guo Bin — known as Bin Bin — with prosthetic eyes that will look and move more like normal eyes, but which do not restore vision.

A personal assistant to Dr. Dennis Lam Shun-Chiu said the surgery started Tuesday afternoon at Lam’s private hospital in Shenzhen.

Police in the boy’s home province of Shanxi say they suspect his aunt gouged out his eyes, but have not identified a motive for last month’s attack. The woman has since committed suicide.

Ho said Bin Bin and his family travelled to Shenzhen on Sunday.

 

Diabetes rises in China, reaching ‘alert’ level

The disease was more common in China than in the United States even though the population was slimmer

Almost 12 percent of adults in China had diabetes in 2010, with economic prosperity driving the disease to slightly higher proportions than in the United States, researchers said Tuesday.

The overall prevalence of diabetes in China in 2010 was found to be 11.6 percent of adults — 12.1 percent in men, and 11 percent in women, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

In the United States, about 11.3 percent of people over 20 have diabetes according to 2011 data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The disease was more common in China than in the United States even though the population was slimmer — average body mass index, a ratio of height and body weight, was just 23.7 in China compared to 28.7 in the United States.

“The prevalence of diabetes has increased significantly in recent decades,” said the JAMA study.

“These data suggest that diabetes may have reached an alert level in the Chinese general population, with the potential for a major epidemic of diabetes-related complications, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, and chronic kidney disease in China in the near future without an effective national intervention.”

Only 30 percent of Chinese with diabetes were aware of their condition, it said.

Further, about half of the population has high blood sugar, or a condition known as pre-diabetes, according to a nationally representative sample of Chinese adults.

Diabetes has been rising in China along with the nation`s economic growth. In 1980, the prevalence of diabetes was less than one percent of the population.

The latest findings mark a more than two percentage point increase over 2007, when a national survey found a 9.7 percent prevalence of diabetes, or about 92.5 million adults.

The current data puts the total number of cases of diabetes in China at 113.9 million.

Worldwide, diabetes affects about 8.3 percent of the global population, or 371 million people.

“China is now among the countries with the highest diabetes prevalence in Asia and has the largest absolute disease burden of diabetes in the world,” said the study.

The Chinese survey included more than 98,650 people and was led by Guang Ning, head of the Shanghai Institute of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases and colleagues with the 2010 China Non-communicable Disease Surveillance Group.

Diabetes was more common in urban areas and among young and middle aged people who were overweight or obese, and was found to be increasing along with economic development.

The research suggested that one cause for the growing trend could be poor nutrition among pregnant women and young babies, combined with overeating later in life.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease, and can be managed with improved nutrition and exercise, as well as medication if needed.

According to an accompanying editorial in JAMA by Juliana Chan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, “rapid modernization” has fuelled an environment that encourages diabetes “characterized by food abundance, physical inactivity, and psychosocial stress.”

The CDC says that diabetes is a top cause of blindness, kidney failure and amputations of the legs and feet, and was the seventh leading cause of death in the US in 2007.

One in three US adults will have diabetes by 2050 if current trends continue, according to the CDC.

The disease is characterized by the body`s shortage of insulin, or an inability to use the hormone efficiently for converting glucose into energy.

Source: http://zeenews.india.com/news/health/health-news/diabetes-rises-in-china-reaching-alert-level_23744.html